Andromeda (novel)

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Andromeda is the German title of a novel by Michael Crichton from 1969 (in the English original The Andromeda Strain ). It is assigned to the genre science fiction . The only German translation to date, developed by Norbert Wölfl , was also published by Droemer-Knaur , Munich and Zurich in 1969 , and has had several editions since then.

action

The plot of the novel extends over five days and begins with the unscheduled landing of an unmanned American space probe, which was supposed to collect organic matter in orbit around the earth, in the small town of Piedmont in Arizona. After almost all the residents of the settlement and the team that is supposed to recover the probe perish, the Steppenbrand company (in the original English wildfire ) , which has been prepared for such incidents, is started. Five scientists come together in a remote, underground, government laboratory to determine what triggered the epidemic.

shape

The book is divided into the five days of the crisis, held in the form of a fictitious factual report and interspersed with documents and computer graphics in the style of the time. It has - unusual for fictional literature - an appendix with a bibliography . In the book, which appeared immediately before the American moon landing , Crichton picks up on a current, scientific topic with a great media presence at the time - a recipe for success that he also varied again and again in later works.

Film adaptations

In 1971 the book was made into a film by Robert Wise , the German title is Andromeda - Tödlicher Staub aus dem All , in the original The Andromeda Strain . Under this title, Tony and Ridley Scott produced a two-part film adaptation for television in 2008 , which is based on Crichton's original.

Trivia

The British band Apollo 440 used a sentence from the original English version of the film for their piece Ain't Talkin '' Bout Dub in 1995 : Let's go back to the rock and see it at 440 ( Let's go back to the rock at 440 times View enlargement) .